Searching for a Master's to apply to

After deciding to do a Master's degree and before applying to some programs, I had to make a list of those Master's I would apply to.

Here's how I made my final list of four to five universities to study to.

This started one year before I actually applied to Master's programs.

This was a tedious part of the process, but it was my future what was at stake, so it was worth it.

Guiding principles

Don't put all your eggs in one basket: This is what I had in mind during this moment.

There's no guarantee the program of your dreams will have enough space, funding, or projects for you, so you need to diversify. Putting all your hopes into a dream program is a way of setting yourself up for disaster.

The more prudent way of doing it is to decide for many programs where you think you could be comfortable while studying a Master's degree of acceptable quality for you. I'm not saying to have low-tier standards, instead I am saying that one has to be realistic: know thyself.

With that, here are the guiding principles for my search of Master's to apply to.

Places

From my personal history as well as future plans, I was sure I wanted to study in Europe, so I only looked for programs inside the countries of the European Union.

I'm sure I missed a lot of good programs in the U.S.A, the U.K., Australia, Canada, Russia, and China, but that's the kind of compromise one has to make in order to fulfill some personal plans.

Luckily, there are a lot of universities to look at in the E.U.

Even luckier, the E.U. has Erasmus Master's, that take place in more than one country! I added those programs that either currently were Erasmus programs, or that had recently been Erasmus programs (because they tend to also have local funding).

I made a Google Sheet of my own ranking of countries, from high (5) to low (1).

Financial stuff

Money, always a complicated issue....

Not being rich, and having a middle-class family in a developing country like Peru, I could not finance a full study program + cost of living in Europe on my own.

Even though I had some savings from my work, I would have been barely enough for a year.

So I restricted my program search to two conditions:

Countries with (virtually) free education for non-europeans
Programs with (almost) full scholarships

As for countries with virtually free education for non-europeans, that gave me

Germany
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Louxemburg

The programs with (almost) full scholarships I had to search for in a university-by-university basis.

Application requirements

There are some requirements that one can expect to always be requested, like proof of English proficiency.

However, other requirements, seem to be more a hassle to impede large numbers of students from applying: The GRE and the GMAT.

Though intended to somehow help admission offices, in reality, these exams are just a sham: there are courses and forums dedicated to passing them with good grades without actually being a knowledgeable student.

Additionally, preparation for taking those exams takes months, the exams themselves are somewhat expensive, and the conditions for sharing your grades for the applications processes you want are outright abusive.

These exams end up evaluating how much one has prepared for them.

For these reasons, I did not consider any programs that required either one of them, and oh, how much time and money have I saved!

Available programs

By this time, I was thinking of going into Applied Mathematics (modelling, or PDEs. Very boring, I know).

Thus, I had to look up those universities that had Applied Mathematics programs.

The legwork

With those guiding principles, my long search started.

Sources

I looked at two university rankings, filtered by country, and then searched for the top 15 to 20 universities in the country, for many European countries.

Also, I filtered by Area (Mathematics) and looked into the top 100 of them.

The rankings where:

Screening process

Using the criteria of the guiding principles, I tried to make a list of those universities and programs that satisfied them.

At the beginning, for the first five universities I found, I tried to understand the whole application process, documents required, scholarship information, etc. Then I quickly noticed that that would not work: Every university had not only its own application criteria, but its own labyrinthine website. My strategy had to change.

My new method was to just quickly look at their available programs.

I wrote down on a Google Sheet all the universities that called my attention. I tried not to spent more than 10 minutes in a single university website.

BTW, French and German universities had the most disorganized and user unfriendly websites.

These took me around 3 months. I had to screen lots of universities.

The first list

My first list had around 100 surviving universities:

The second list: More screening

From the first list, I started looking into their programs. I tried not to spend more than one hour in each university. This is where I filtered out those universities without applied math programs, and also those that asked for GRE/GMAT exams.

I also took a quick look at estimated prices, fees, and cost of living:

Around thirty universities survived up to this point.

The final list: Refined filtering

With my second list ready, I started looking deep into the surviving universities' programs:

Program: Courses, labs, projects, professors, etc.

Application process: Everything required to apply, even application fees.

In general: What programs seemed like a good fit for me, academically, financially, and personally.

The final list of Master's I decided to apply to was:

Mathmods: Joint Master in Mathematical Modelling in Engineering, in Germany, Italy, an/or France (As of 2020, it was an ex-Erasmus program with local funding)
COSSE: Computer Simulations for Science and Engineering, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden, Germany, and/or the Netherlands. (As of 2020, it was an ex-Erasmus program with local funding)
Applied and Computational Mathematics: at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden.
Computational Science and Engineering: at Technische Universität Wien, in Austria.

It took me months of screening to get to this point, but I really felt those places would be good for me.

You may notice something strange with that list, and I'll address it in the next section....

A surprise candidate

If you have read other parts of this blog, you surely have noticed something:

The Master's I ended up going to is not in the final list above! How could this be?

Here comes the story of how I ended up applying to the LCT Language and Communication Technologies Master's.

The conversation

While traveling to meet friends abroad, I met a friend's friend who was a philosophy major with an interest in computing and we struck a conversation about the human Language potential.

We went about it for hours, eventually ignoring some of the other people around us. The topics ended up including philosophical logic, mathematical logic, foundations of mathematics, computation, linguistics, constructed languages, what the hell do A.I. and M.L do?, what's the role of proofs and programs? and so on. Eventually, he mentioned something called "Computational linguistics", that nobody was quite sure what it meant, but it was a field in development.

This conversation made me realized that Applied Mathematics was something I could do, but that had moderate interest for me, and that my long dormant interest for languages was still there. Not only that, I was presented with a field that had a component from Humanities (through linguistics) and a component from mathematics (through programming), which was not Economics! (sorry, economists!) Even better, the field offered the chance to mix industry and research without necessarily going into academia.

If I just could find a Master's in that area....

The search

The conversation was in February 2020, and during the following days, I searched for Master's in Computational Linguistics.

After looking at the Erasmus Master's official list, I came across the LCT program.

It looked amazing for me, and it even had an scholarship! In a few hours I decided to apply.

I only had two weeks until the deadline!

Luckily, had already gotten my documents ready for the other applications (more info on getting documents ready in another post), so the effort of applying was minimal, and there was no application fee.

The lesson

Was all my screening process worthless?

Not at all, it made clear to me what I expected from a Master's program to consider it at least decent. I got a feel of when a study path was not for me.

It helped me get ready for knowing about the most commonly requested documents.

The process made me realize that the Master's is a serious medium term project, and choosing well will influence a lot in my future.

And it gave me a list of satisfactory options for my future, and I avoided betting all into a single path.

Note that at the end my list had now five candidates, and I prepared to apply to all of them.